Showing papers in "American Journal of Sociology in 2015"

Was There a Hawthorne Effect

Abstract: The "Hawthorne effect" has been an enduring legacy of the celebrated studies of workplace behavior conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Western Electric's Hawthorne Plant. This article examines the empirical evidence for the existence of Hawthorne effects using the original data from the Hawthorne Relay Assembly Tes Room. Allowing for a variety of other factors, the author assesses whether experimental changes, variously defined, had a common effect that could be regarded as a pure result of the experimentation. The main conclusion is that these data show slender or no evidence of a Hawthorne effect.

Stress and Hardship after Prison.

Abstract: The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women. Leaving prison presents the challenge of social integration—of connecting with family and finding housing and a means of subsistence. The authors study variation in social integration in the first months after prison release with data from the Boston Reentry Study, a unique panel survey of 122 newly released prisoners. The data indicate severe material hardship immediately after incarceration. Over half of sample respondents were unemployed, two-thirds received public assistance, and many relied on female relatives for financial support and housing. Older respondents and those with histories of addiction and mental illness were the least socially integrated, with weak family ties, unstable housing, and low levels of employment. Qualitative interviews show that anxiety and feelings of isolation accompanied extreme material insecurity. Material insecurity combined with the...

The Functions and Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States

Abstract: For a capatalist economy to function, its labor force must be maintained; that is, workers must receive a historically determined minimal day-to-day subsistence. It must also be renewed; that is, vacancies must be filled. A system of migrant labor is characterized by the institutional differentiation and physical separation of the processes of renewal and maintenance. Accordingly, migrant labor entails a dual dependence upon employment in one place and an alternate economy and/or state in another. In addition, the separation of migrant workers from their families is implied. It is enforced through specific legal and political mechanisms which regulate geographical mobility and impose restrictions on the occupational mobility of migrants. These mechanisms in turn are made possible by the migrant workers'powerlessness in the place of employment, in the labor market, and under the legal and political systems where they are employed. One consequence of a system of migrant labor is the externalization, to an a...

Why do liberals drink lattes

Abstract: Popular accounts of “lifestyle politics” and “culture wars” suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972–2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of “latte liberals” and “bird-hunting conservatives” much like the one in which we live.

The Cost of Color: Skin Color, Discrimination, and Health among African-Americans.

Abstract: In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intraracial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that self-reported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewer-rated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive and multidimensional approaches to ethnor...

Residential Propinquity as a Factor in Marriage Selection

Abstract: Five thousand consecutive marriage licenses, in which one or both applicants were residents of Philadelphia, were tabulated according to distance between the residences of the couples. One-third of all the couples lived within five or less blocks of each other, and the percentage of marriages decreased steadily and markedly as the distance between residences of the contracting parties increased. The extent to which the role of residential propinquity is confined to social areas in which specific attributes or combinations of attributes are concentrated will be considered in the series of projects of which this was the initial step.

Love thy neighbor? Ethnoracial diversity and trust reexamined

Abstract: According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of “diversity” and invites scholars to rethink “social capital” in complex societies. It reproduces the analysis of Putnam and shows that the association between diversity and self-reported trust is a compositional artifact attributable to residential sorting: nonwhites report lower trust and are overrepresented in heterogeneous communities. The association between diversity and trust is better explained by differences between communities and their residents in terms of race/ethnicity, residential stability, and economic conditions; these classic indicators of inequality, not diversity, strongly and consistently predict self-reported trust. Diversity indexes also obscure the distinction between in-group and out-group contact. For whites, heterogeneity means more out-group neighbors; for nonwhites, heterogeneity means more in-group neighbors. Theref...

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.

Abstract: Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one’s ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. The authors also suggest that a proper understanding of agency’s potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Using the Youth Development Study, the authors employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life expectations in addition to the traditional approach on a range of important outcomes.

The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion.

Abstract: Recent research on social contagion has demonstrated significant effects of network topology on the dynamics of diffusion. However, network topologies are not given a priori. Rather, they are patterns of relations that emerge from individual and structural features of society, such as population composition, group heterogeneity, homophily, and social consolidation. Following Blau and Schwartz, the author develops a model of social network formation that explores how social and structural constraints on tie formation generate emergent social topologies and then explores the effectiveness of these social networks for the dynamics of social diffusion. Results show that, at one extreme, high levels of consolidation can create highly balkanized communities with poor integration of shared norms and practices. As suggested by Blau and Schwartz, reducing consolidation creates more crosscutting circles and significantly improves the dynamics of social diffusion across the population. However, the author finds that further reducing consolidation creates highly intersecting social networks that fail to support the widespread diffusion of norms and practices, indicating that successful social diffusion can depend on moderate to high levels of structural consolidation.

Game changer: : The topology of creativity

Abstract: This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers—cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding—the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addit...

The Making of a Good Woman: Extended Parental Leave Entitlements and Mothers' Work Commitment in Germany.

Abstract: The authors investigate the relationship between family policy and women's attachment to the labor market, focusing specifically on policy feedback on women's subjective work commitment. They utilize a quasi-experimental design to identify normative policy effects from changes in mothers' work commitment in conjunction with two policy changes that significantly extended the length of statutory parental leave entitlements in Germany. Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and difference-in-differences, triple-differenced, and instrumental variables estimators for panel data, they obtain consistent empirical evidence that increasing generosity of leave entitlements led to a decline in mothers' work commitment in both East and West Germany. They also probe potential mediating mechanisms and find strong evidence for role exposure and norm setting effects. Finally, they demonstrate that policy-induced shifts in mothers' preferences have contributed to. retarding women's labor force participation after childbirth in Germany, especially as far as mothers' return to full-time employment is concerned.

Neoclassical Sociology: From the End of Communism to the End of Classes1

Abstract: American sociology marked the triumphalism of the immediate postwar period with its emblematic “end of ideology” thesis. Class struggle for an alternative socialist order was ruled an anachronism because capitalism and liberal democracy could effectively deliver expanded freedoms and improved living standards. America was as good as it gets while “communism” was the despised, totalitarian “other.” Protagonists of the “the end of ideology”—the most famous being Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Philip Selznick—had themselves started out as unrepentant socialists in the 1930s. Their drift toward complacency, culminating in 1950s “functionalism,” was itself overtaken by the successor radicalism of the 1960s, a radicalism that pointed to the seamy side of U.S. capitalism and the limits of its “democracy.” This revolt against the end of ideology and its concomitant “anticommunism” inspired such commentators as Ivan Szelenyi and David Stark in the 1970s and 1980s to develop alternative class critiques of actually existing “communism.” They reconceptualized communism in more positive terms as “state socialism,” pointing to its potentialities as well as its limits. Szelenyi came to his (new) class analysis of state socialism by joining critical sociology drawn from the West to the critical theory of the Budapest school, while Stark’s interest

Single or Triple Melting-Pot? Intermarriage Trends in New Haven, 1870-1940

Abstract: In New Haven a "triple-melting-pot" type of assimilation is occuring through intermarriage, with Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism serving as the three fundamental bulwarks. Catholics mostly marry other Catholics; Jews almost always choose Jewish mates; while Protestants prefer non-Catholic Gentiles. Our statistics show a marked adherence to these religious choices. Thus the different nationalities are merging, but within three religious compartments rather than indiscriminately: with Protestant British-Americans, Germans, and Scandinavians intermarrying mutually; Catholic Irish, Italians, and Poles forming a separate intermarrying group; and Jews remaining almost completely endogamous. A triple religious cleavage rather than a multilinear nationality cleavage, therefore, seems likely to characterize American society in the future. When mixed marriage does occur, it would appear that the relative strength of each religion can be gauged by the type of ceremony employed to sanction such unions. In New...

Cultural Isolation and the Schizophrenic Personality

Abstract: Data from various sources appear to support the hypothesis that the "shut-in" or "seclusive" personality, which is generally considered to be the basis of schizophrenia, may be the result of an extended period of "cultural isolation," that is, separation from intimate and sympathetic social contacts. A large number of the cases in the hospital records show some history of this isolation, and many even show evidence that the patient had once been normally sociable and developed the seclusiveness only after a long period of isolation. Descriptions of prisoners in solitary confinement, and other spatially isolated peoples, show that in time many develop the typical schizoid symptoms. An examination of the early social situation indicates that the large number of schizophrenics came from communities in which the social disorganization was very marked and an intimate social life was difficult to achieve. Where social contacts are adequate, the schizoid personality type is rare or completely lacking. Finally, t...

How Places Shape Identity: The Origins of Distinctive LBQ Identities in Four Small U.S. Cities.

Abstract: Tools from the study of neighborhood effects, place distinction, and regional identity are employed in an ethnography of four small cities with growing populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified (LBQ) women to explain why orientations to sexual identity are relatively constant within each site, despite informants' within-city demographic heterogeneity, but vary substantially across the sites, despite common place-based attributes. The author introduces the concept of "sexual identity cultures"--and reveals the defining role of cities in shaping their contours. She finds that LBQ numbers and acceptance, place narratives, and newcomers' encounters with local social attributes serve as touchstones. The article looks beyond major categorical differences (e.g., urban/rural) to understand how and why identities evolve and vary and to reveal the fundamental interplay of demographic, cultural, and other city features previously thought isolatable. The findings challenge notions of identity as fixed and emphasize the degree to which self-understanding and group understanding remain collective accomplishments.

Cooperative Networks: Altruism, Group Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Sanctioning in Ugandan Producer Organizations.

Abstract: Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and the threat of sanctioning--and tests which of them brings about cooperation in the context of Ugandan producer organizations. Using an innovative methodological framework that combines "lab-in-the-field" experiments with survey interviews and complete social networks data, the article goes beyond the assessment of a relationship between social networks and collective outcomes to study the mechanisms that favor cooperative behavior. The article first establishes a positive relationship between position in the network structure and propensity to cooperate in the producer organization and then uses farmers' behavior in dictator and public goods games to test different mechanisms that may account for such a relationship. Results show that cooperation is induced by patterns of reciprocity that emerge through repeated interaction rather than other-regarding preferences like altruism or group solidarity.

Abortion Liberalization in World Society, 1960-2009.

Abstract: Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women’s rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women’s leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries’ links to a global women’s rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women’s autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerf...

Ethnic Residential Segregation: Patterns of Change

Abstract: This study traces changes in patterns of ethnic residential segregation for Cleveland from 1930 to 1970 and for Boston and Seattle form 1960 to 1970. For Cleveland the data indicate some clear declines in residential segregation since 1930 for "new" southern and eastern European ethnic group; "old" groups, however, actually increased in segregation. Between 1960 and 1970, we could find few changes in patterns of ethnic segregation for Boston, Cleveland, and Seattle. On the whole, we found that differences in residential segregation among ethnic groups, both cross-sectionally and over time, were highly related to differences in social status. It is clear, nevertheless, that ethnic segregation would continue to exist even if social status differences among ethnic groups disappeared.

Go with your gut: Emotion and evaluation in job interviews

Abstract: This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins's theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional service firms to unpack how employers' emotional reactions to applicants in job interviews affect hiring evaluations. She finds that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates-akin to Collins's concept of emotional energy--to-evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. With these data, she constructs an original theoretical framework of emotional energy development, which highlights the qualities that tend to produce or inhibit the subjective experience of emotional energy in job interviews. Additionally, she outlines the particular phases of an encounter where energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. She discusses the implications of these findings for research on hiring, labor market stratification, and interaction rituals.

Extreme Social Isolation of a Child

Abstract: A girl of more than five years was discovered incarcerated in an upstairs room. She had apparently been there since babyhood and was physically malnourished and apathetic as well as mentally blank. Taken first to county home, then to a foster-home, and finally to a school for detective children, she improved very slowly. She is still a virtually unsocialized creature, manifesting many parallels with other cases of isolated children and bearing out the Cooley-Mead-Dewey-Faris theory of socialization.

On the Emergence of Oligarchy in Human Interaction

Abstract: The elementary conditions of human interaction generate Michels's (1910) "iron law of oligarchy" and Mosca's (1896) major proposition on system size and ruling elites, the latter holding without regard to the definitional restrictions recently examined by Mayhew (1973). Specifically, the structure of focused face-to-face interaction constrains chance expectations for power relations. Power is constrained to equalize (by change alone) as interaction sequences increase in length. Power is constrained to polarize (by chance alone) as group size increases. Since interaction sequences falling within the operative range of human perception as specified by Miller (1956) and Simon (1974) are relatively short, power will be increasingly concentrated as a function of group size in most situations, yielding Michels's law and Mosca's proposition. As these regularities hold at much smaller sizes than originally specified by Michels (1911), their implications for macro-level control structures are examined in light of ...

Do Different Methods for Modeling Age-Graded Trajectories Yield Consistent and Valid Results?

Abstract: Data on age-sequenced trajectories of individuals’ attributes are used for a growing number of research purposes. However, there is no consensus about which method to use to identify the number of discrete trajectories in a population or to assign individuals to a specific trajectory group. The authors modeled real and simulated trajectory data using “naive” methods, optimal matching, grade of membership models, and three types of finite-mixture models. They found that these methods produced inferences about the number of trajectories that frequently differ (1) from one another and (2) from the truth as represented by simulation parameters. They also found that they differed in the assignment of individuals to trajectory groups. In light of these findings, the authors argue that researchers should interpret results based on these methods cautiously, neither reifying point estimates about the number of trajectories nor treating individuals’ trajectory group assignments as certain.

Comment on Hauser's Review of Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality

Abstract: Robert Hauser's review of Education, Opportunity, and Social Inequality (American Journal of Sociology [January 1976]: 911-28) contains useful suggestions and comments. However, my general impression is that he has not understood the very objective of my book, probably because I have not made this objective clear enough: to explain, in the sense of making intelligible, a number of apparent paradoxes produced by empirical research on social mobility. Here are some of these paradoxes: 1. Inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) decreased more or less regularly in all Western societies during the two decades after World War II. That is, the ratio of the probability of, say, a higher-class son to the probability of a lower-class on going to college declined. However, this decrease had no impact on the structure of intergenerational mobility, although educational attainment is a determinant of status. 2. It had no evident impact on income equality either, although educational attainment is a determinant of income. Obviously, these first two points are paradoxical with respect to the beliefs of many sociologists and economists for whom IEO is an essential factor responsible for other forms of inequality and for their intergenerational transmission. 3. Countries very different with respect to IEO appear as not markedly different from one another with respect to mobility. This is the classical Lipset-Bendix paradoxical finding. 4. Even in countries where IEO is lowest, it is still considerable. That is, the disparity ratio between higher and lower classes as far as college attendance is concerned can be as high as 10 when it is lowest. Is this fact immediately intelligible? 5. Mobility is generally weakly related to educational attainment measured absolutely or relatively to father's educational attainment. If not Hauser, C. A. Anderson in his pioneering paper (1961) had, before me, the impression that this fact was not immediately clear. 6. Sophisticated techniques uch as path analysis have been intensively used in recent years by stratification researchers. They have led to many

The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition

Abstract: The National Socialist party can be explained as a fusion of two types of domination-charismatic and bureaucratic. The charismatic claim to leadership means that no status on the basis of specialized achievement can be accorded without the approval of the leader. He delegates powers to his faithful followers, the "inner circle," selected on the basis of his personal preference. There is no party democracy because all authority emanates from the leader. The bureaucratic nature of the organization attracts those with bureaucratic backgrounds, and hence there is a preponderance of teachers among the functionaries. The disadvantaged, with their great disparity between self-esteem and status, accept the charismatic leadership. Thus there is a heavy representation of the middle class. Youth is attracted by the charismatic aspect. The liquidation of existing bureaucracies leads to competition among the "inner circle" in organizing new bureaucracies and this leads to much duplication of agencies. No one can enter...

Agents of change or cogs in the machine? Reexamining the influence of female managers on the gender wage gap

Abstract: Do female managers act in ways that narrow or instead act in ways that preserve or even widen the gender wage gap? Although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate, the empirical evidence to date has favored the former view Yet this evidence comes primarily from cross-establishment surveys, which do not provide visibility into individual managers’ choices Using longitudinal personnel records from an information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion over employee salaries, we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers reduce the gender wage gap among their subordinates Consistent with the theory of value threat, we instead find conditional support for the cogs-in-the-machine perspective: in the subsample of high-performing supervisors and low-performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch

The Structure of Contingency1

Abstract: Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact—pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic—and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this conting...

Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? A Study in Social Valuation

Abstract: There is a significant discrepancy between the law and popular judgment as to how the law should be applied in assigning punishments for thirteen studied felonies. This probably reflects "cultural lag" in the law as compared to popular conceptions, although the cases studied are too unrepresentative for generalization. Background characteristics of the judges are related to the judgments made. Many subjects were willing to be deliberately nonequalitarian in punishing convicted criminals from different classes in the population. A technique is presented for ascertaining the mental equivalency of two logically noncomparable scales of values.

Race, self-selection, and the job search process.

Abstract: While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? Such questions have remained unanswered due to the lack of data available on the positions to which job seekers apply. Drawing on two original data sets with application-specific information, we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job applications. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process.

Family structure instability, genetic sensitivity, and child well-being

Abstract: The association between family structure instability and children’s life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family arrangements. This study examines father household entrances and exits, distinguishing between the entrance of a biological father and a social father and testing for interactions between family structure instability and children’s age, gender, and genetic characteristics. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and focusing on changes in family structure by age (years 0–9), the authors show that father exits are associated with increases in children’s antisocial behavior, a strong predictor of health and well-being in adulthood. The pattern for father entrances is more complicated, with entrances for the biological father being associated with lower antisocial behavior among boys and social father entrances being associated with higher antisocial behavior. Child’s a...

Where Do Immigrants Fare Worse? Modeling Workplace Wage Gap Variation with Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data

Abstract: The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workplace wage inequalities between native Swedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are that immigrant-native wage gaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based claims on organizational resources, the central causal mechanism identified by relational inequality theory, to be stronger. The authors conclude that workpl...